Okay, so having gone through Days of Future Past and Days of Future Present separately, I wanted to put them next to each other for a minute. Obviously, I've been reading a lot of X-Men and X-related titles, working through them chronologically. These two stood out to me, and part of that is what happens between them. By the time you reach Days of Future Present, you've spent more time with people who have to actually live with what Days of Future Past introduced.
I know there are other iterations coming up. I haven't read those yet, so I'm leaving them alone. This is about the original two issues, the four annuals that make up Days of Future Present, and where those stories sit in what I've read so far.
Because when you describe them quickly, you can make them sound like variations on the same thing. Terrible future, somebody comes back, the people in the present have to deal with it. But once you're reading them, that description leaves out almost everything worth discussing.
Start with what the person coming back actually wants. Kate Pryde has a specific reason for going into her younger self's body. Rachel helps send her consciousness back so she can stop Senator Kelly's assassination. Kate can point to an event and explain why the X-Men need to act. There is a lot they don't understand, but the immediate job is understandable. Keep this man alive.
Franklin arrives with a much harder problem to explain to anybody. The present doesn't match what he remembers. Home is different. People are different. Rachel is different. And he has enough power that his disappointment can become a problem for everyone around him before they even understand what's happening.
That's already an interesting difference. Kate needs the present to turn out differently from her history. Franklin keeps trying to make the present fit the history he recognizes. Both have lost people and both are reaching backward toward something they can't get to any other way. Their reasons for reaching back don't lead them toward the same kind of answer.
And this is where the ending of the original matters. Kelly survives, but we don't get some great guarantee that everything has been fixed. Project Wideawake is still there. The thinking that could produce that future hasn't conveniently disappeared because the X-Men won one fight. Stopping the assassination matters enormously, but how much can one successful intervention promise you about the years that follow?
That uncertainty leaves room for Days of Future Present to matter without turning the original into a failed mission. You can save somebody today and still have work to do tomorrow. You can also encounter a person whose history contains something you are trying to prevent. Rachel has to exist in that uncomfortable space. The people around her can talk about avoiding a possible future. She remembers living there.
Which is really where putting these stories together gets more complicated than just comparing plots. In the original, we're looking at people whose lives have been wrecked, and then we're watching an attempt to prevent that. Later, Rachel is standing in the present with those experiences already behind her. However everybody else wants to classify her timeline, she still has to get through the day with those memories.
You know, it's easy to say, well, let's make sure that future never happens. Of course that's what you want. But what does that sentence sound like to somebody whose childhood was there? Her friends were there. People she loved were there. The fact that the world was horrible doesn't mean every relationship inside it was meaningless or that she can just stop needing the people she lost.
Franklin brings that directly into the room. He knows a Rachel that most of the people around her can't know. There is a whole part of her life she doesn't have to introduce from the beginning with him. That gives their connection a weight that the title alone couldn't give it. He belongs to her history, and that history is much more than the disaster everybody else wants to avoid.
But then you have to keep asking which Rachel he is responding to. The one standing in front of him has continued living. She has experiences beyond what he remembers. Recognizing her doesn't give him a complete understanding of her, and having a shared past doesn't settle what either of them needs now.
Jean makes the same problem even harder from the other direction. Rachel comes into that relationship carrying the importance of a mother. Jean hasn't lived the life that would give her the same relationship with Rachel. You can understand why Rachel needs acceptance without pretending Jean has somehow misplaced years of memories she ought to have.
And there isn't a sentence that fixes that. Explaining the time travel can establish how somebody is related to somebody else. It can't provide all the time they would have spent together. Rachel's need is real, and Jean's lack of that shared experience is real too. The Phoenix connection makes it even more difficult for Jean to separate what Rachel is asking from everything else this brings up for her.
That's why I wouldn't describe the crossover as bringing the family together and leave it there. It puts them in contact. It makes things impossible to ignore. Rachel still doesn't get everything she is reaching for just because the immediate crisis ends. Some of the problems have become clearer without becoming easier.
Then Franklin's situation changes how you look back at what he has been doing. We're dealing with a dream manifestation of the future Franklin who died, sustained through Rachel and the younger Franklin. That makes the attempt to restore familiar people and places especially difficult. He is trying to keep hold of a life that has ended, while the people helping sustain him have lives that are still happening.
And those lives can't just become material he rearranges until he feels better. The baby Nathan situation makes that impossible to brush aside. Nathan doesn't fit Franklin's understanding of the family, so Franklin removes him. The backup, The Fundamental Things, brings him back and lets Wolverine push Franklin and Rachel on the responsibility involved. There is an actual child on the other side of all this talk about what belongs in the timeline.
That example matters when you're comparing the two stories. Kate's mission asks the X-Men to protect a life because of what its loss could lead to. Franklin can get so caught up in restoring what he recognizes that someone else's life becomes something to remove. Knowing a future, or remembering a different present, doesn't automatically make every decision you take because of it a good one.
Ahab makes the question of who controls somebody's life much more deliberate and vicious. Rachel has already experienced being used as a Hound. Now he comes after her again, and even Scott and Sue are made into Hounds. These are people with relationships and responsibilities being turned into tools for hunting other people. The future has reached into the present in a very physical way.
Franklin and Ahab aren't interchangeable, and flattening them into the same sort of villain would miss what Franklin's part of the story is doing. But the people caught up in this still need somebody to recognize that their lives belong to them. Ahab's intentions are obviously brutal. Franklin's pain gives you a reason to understand him, while leaving the damage he causes right there to deal with.
The difference in the size of the stories affects this too. Days of Future Past has two issues. There is very little space to settle into anything. You see enough of the future to understand the urgency, and the present-day mission has a clear shape. The people fighting in the future don't get safety just because the plan in the past has reached its important moment. You're still looking at what surviving long enough to try has cost them.
Days of Future Present moves through the Fantastic Four, the New Mutants, X-Factor and the X-Men. That gives it more people and more competing relationships to work through. You spend time figuring out what Franklin means to each group, what he is trying to recover, and what his presence is doing to Rachel. Comparing the two just by how quickly they move would leave a lot of that out.
For me, the useful conversation is what becomes visible when you keep reading. The original gives you a future you want these characters to escape. Days of Future Present makes you spend more time with the people who remember it, including the things they would want back. Rachel can want that world prevented and still miss somebody from it. Franklin can need help and still need to be stopped. The X-Men can win the fight in front of them without getting a promise about everything afterward.
Reading them chronologically gives those questions some room. You aren't only jumping from one similar title to another. There are lives happening in between. By the time that future comes back into the conversation, the people dealing with it have more history of their own, and the present has more in it than a set of events somebody from the future might want to change.
Now, there was another story I wanted to mention with this, and I want to be clear that it is unrelated. Forever Yesterday, in New Warriors #11 through #13. The opening chapter is called Days of Present Past, which is part of why it belonged in this conversation for me, but I am not calling it another installment of Rachel's future or the Sentinel storyline.
I got to those New Warriors issues because I was following the material involving Firestar, including her history with Emma Frost. Emma gives up her claim on Firestar in #10, just before Forever Yesterday starts. So there was a specific character storyline bringing me into this book, and I wanted to follow that through.
So that's the route I took into it. I was following a character connection out of the X-related material, and then this other story interested me on its own. Suddenly you're dealing with an altered world built around Egypt having remained dominant, and familiar Marvel characters are living under very different circumstances. Even seeing the Avengers there means something different from what you're used to expecting.
What connects it to this discussion for me is that you already know enough of the usual world to notice what has changed. You recognize people, but recognition doesn't tell you where they stand or what their lives have been. You have to work through the version of the world the story is giving you instead of assuming that a familiar face guarantees a familiar role.
That is a different problem from Kate trying to stop an assassination or Rachel meeting somebody from the future she survived. Forever Yesterday changes the history behind the world the characters are dealing with. It has its own explanation and its own story to resolve. The similar chapter title is a reason to mention it here, not a reason to force it into the same continuity discussion.
And that's part of what I wanted to get across about this read-through. Following Firestar and Emma took me into New Warriors for a specific reason.
Okay, so having gone through Days of Future Past and Days of Future Present separately, I wanted to put them next to each other for a minute. Obviously, I've been reading a lot…
· Comics / Marvel / X-Men